A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  We met, with the lawyers and accompanied by our prison escorts, in the law courts. After giving evidence we were allowed a few minutes together in the robing-room, with our counsel Khaki Roberts. Looking forward to this meeting and thinking about it afterwards kept me happy for several days. M. was very thin; he had grown a beard because the shaving arrangements at Brixton were so revolting. The newspapers paid costs and an agreed sum of damages. With my share Muv bought me a shaggy fur coat, it was not very elegant but it was warm. I looked like Fafner and Fasolt rolled into one, I wore it all day and it covered my bed at night. I often felt grateful to the journalist who had invented the orgies.

  There were air raids almost every night that winter. The Home Office had given orders that our cells were to be unlocked when the sirens sounded; apparently it was thought that we might become hysterical if we were locked up when bombs were falling. Only the wardresses had torches; the lights were put off at the mains and one crept about in pitch dark. I generally went and sat with Mrs. Duff, whose cell was on the ground floor. We used to sit and laugh; despite the misery of our situation cheerfulness broke through and there were certainly plenty of things to laugh at in the prison. One night she had struck a match to light her cigarette when a wardress passing the cell saw the glimmer through the open door. ‘Duff!’ she cried in terrified tones, ‘put out that light!’

  ‘There’s a black curtain on the window,’ said Mrs. Duff.

  ‘Yes, I know. But if an incendiary came in you might set it off!’ As the months passed the attitude of the wardresses towards us changed completely. Probably at the beginning they had thought we must be traitors, or near-traitors, because otherwise how was it that we had been locked up by the good and noble men who were leading the nation? After a while they came to know us fairly well and most of them were very kind and friendly. I was fond of several of them and they told delightful prison stories.

  The prison words never ceased to amuse. Reception, for example, which in the ordinary world means a rather dull and formal sort of party, was the broom cupboard already described. Court was a police court, not Buckingham Palace. Wing, such a beautiful word, meant a section of the vile prison. Garden Party was a group of bedraggled prisoners who, directed by an ignorant wardress, dug for victory in the prison yard. To a wardress, the word ‘woman’ means a convicted prisoner. One of them told me: ‘I took my woman to court and we were waiting for our case to come on when one of the policemen called down to us: “Would any of you women like a cup of tea?” Well! I didn’t know what to say. He meant us officers! Of course I suppose we are women, but women! you women! Wasn’t it rude, it was ever so rude, I felt like saying no.’ But to wardresses, who are like nurses in this respect, tea is the elixir of life. ‘She’s been to the reception’ and ‘Come along for the garden party’ were added to after the Advisory Committee changed its venue; one heard: ‘Are you going to Ascot?’

  Just occasionally concerts were given for the prisoners by well-meaning and philanthropic visiting musicians. They took place in the chapel. Compared with the dirty, smelly, dark old prison the chapel was rather pleasant, it was clean, well-polished and brightly lit. At one of these concerts there was a man who sang folk songs and at the end of each line of verse he raised himself on tiptoe and poked his head out first to the right and then to the left. I began to laugh and could not stop, something that had never happened to me since childhood. I buried my face in my hands and tears of laughter ran through my fingers. Terrified that he might see me and be deeply hurt, I bit my tongue; but still I shook with laughter which became more painful with every Hey nonny no from the singer, who had so kindly come to Holloway to amuse the prisoners but had not meant to amuse them quite as much as that. It was agony; back in my cell I was overcome with extreme exhaustion. I hoped he had not noticed, or that perhaps he thought I was like Mme Verdurin, who demonstrated her sensibility by listening to music with her face in her hands.

  The cold weather came and the prison was icier than ever. A wardress appeared with a convict carrying a pile of blankets. I went to get one. Never have I seen a more disgusting sight than these old hard blankets; without going into details every variety of human filth had left its unmistakable marks upon them. I turned away.

  ‘Don’t you want one, dear?’ said the wardress. ‘Not really,’ I replied.

  ‘Here’s a lovely clean one,’ she said. But it was only less foul than the others. As I had asked my visitors for a china plate, a glass, a pillow, so I now asked for a blanket.

  I read nearly all day long, books that were sent in for me and a few from the prison library. The wardresses said that the convicts generally chose a book with a red cover from the tray that came round ‘because they lick their fingers and get a bit of the red dye to put on their lips’. The pathos of this attempt at beautifying themselves on the part of women sentenced to sleep under filthy blankets and to wear coarse and stained underclothes that had been worn by countless prisoners before them, and the scratchy black stockings and painful clumping old shoes in which they were arrayed at the ‘reception’, quite haunted me. Few convicted women remained at Holloway, most had been removed to Aylesbury at the outbreak of war and probably the best prison gear had gone with them, leaving the worst dregs behind. A majority of those one saw had pathetic piebald heads, the ends of their hair being brilliant peroxide while the remainder was either black or grey.

  I read Carlyle’s French Revolution at this time. I thought if, like the prisoners he describes, I had to stay many months in gaol, I would prefer to die. As we had not been sentenced one could not count the days, uncertainty was our lot. It was lucky for me that I could not peer into the future, for had I known that only during the fourth bitter winter would I be set free I should have been near to despair.

  One night a bomb fell hard by the prison. It broke the water mains. In the dark early morning there was the sound of lavatory plugs being pulled in vain. The lavatories, always foul, became frightful. Floors awash with urine, everything choked, an appalling smell. We were all grey with grime because the bomb had shaken the old prison and a thick layer of dust and soot covered everything. We were given half a pint of water each, I drank a sip and tried to wash in the remainder but it only streaked the dirt. It so happened that I was to see Mr. Hickson that day. When he came I said that the prison had become uninhabitable and unless something was done about the lavatories the Home Office would have hundreds of sick women on its hands. Mr. Hickson made sympathetic noises.

  ‘Don’t you know anyone in the government I could appeal to for you?’ he said.

  ‘Know anyone in the government? I know all the Tories beginning with Churchill,’ I cried.

  This was an exaggeration, but I did know several of them and heartily despised them for their hypocrisy; always mouthing platitudes about freedom, free speech and the rule of law. ‘The whole lot deserve to be shot,’ I added.

  Unlike murderers or burglars we were never allowed to see our lawyer alone; the little wardress in the corner must have reported my intemperate words, for ‘Cousin Winston’ knew what I had said, as I discovered years later.

  When we were taken to the yard for exercise that day there was a rush for the row of outdoor lavatories. Mine was fairly clean, but when I emerged I was surrounded by horrified cries of, ‘You shouldn’t have gone in there!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the V on the door?’

  I had noticed that a red V was painted on the door, and thought it was for Victory. The papers were full of tales about Vs which apparently were to be seen here, there and everywhere; the prison was unlikely to be behindhand in this patriotic demonstration.

  ‘That lavatory is only for women with venereal disease,’ I was told.

  One of our number was a French girl who had made her way to London in some unexplained manner from occupied France. When we asked why she had been arrested she said she had been closely interrogated and one of the questions was about the Vs which were sup
posed to be chalked up all over Paris as a gesture of defiance to the German occupying forces. When she said she had never herself seen a V anywhere in Paris her interrogators were so disgusted that they sent her to Holloway, at any rate she could think of no other reason. This girl was quite badly hurt when a bomb fell on the prison. It tore away the landing and she stepped out of her cell in the dark and fell on to the stone floor far below, breaking her leg.

  It was two days before the water flowed once more, and during the second night I was in bed in the dark with the cell door open because an air raid was in progress when I heard horrible sounds of people being sick. Thirteen women were violently ill, all had eaten prison food. Nothing had been washed up in the prison kitchen and no doubt as foul stews succeeded each other in the same dirty vessels poisons were secreted. Doubtless water mains in other parts of London were broken in air raids with similar results to people’s lavatories; what made our situation uniquely horrible was that we were locked in and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

  The governor of Holloway was a sandy-haired Scotchman, Dr. Mathieson, who had lost an eye and a leg in the first war. He received one accompanied by a grim-looking hatchet-faced wardress, Miss Manley; she was unpopular with her underlings who called her Chiefy. One day he sent for me and said: ‘There’s a message from the government: Lady Mosley is to have a bath every day.’ I looked at him. He knew, and I knew, that it was not possible. There were two degraded bathrooms in the wing, and enough water for four baths; we took turns and got a bath roughly once a week. It had been a kindly thought of Winston’s, who had I suppose been told that this was one of the hardships I minded.

  A musical German lady among the prisoners was given permission to bring a gramophone into Holloway. She arranged concerts in a room across the yard and asked me what records I should like. She seemed to be quite rich and ordered dozens. We had Beethoven quartets, the second and the sixth symphonies, Schubert, Bach, Händel, Debussy, Wagner. Despite the tiresome pauses while the gramophone was wound up these concerts were heavenly. There is nothing like music for transporting one a thousand miles from hateful surroundings into realms of bliss.

  This lady was very pretty and she had amazing jewels which she carried around in a fish basket. When I suggested that she might be well advised to give them into the care of the prison authorities she obviously thought I was quite mad. How could one trust one’s jewels to the lying swine who put an innocent woman in a vile prison, she asked.

  Thus day followed day, the level waste, the rounding grey. The weekly visit was lovely but a quarter of an hour went in a flash. I was ashamed that Muv should make the long journey from Swinbrook, and back again in the black-out, in order to sit for ages in the drear prison waiting-room before being admitted to the miserably brief visit. In the holidays she brought the boys; I shall never forget their dear anxious faces as they stared at me, and the relief when they saw I had not much changed, and that I laughed as usual. Alexander was brought up by Nanny; he looked beautiful beyond words with huge dark eyes. He was now two years old and began to talk. A large proportion of B.U. members were released before Christmas, including all those who had small children with the exception of me. There was more room all round, and as a result of M.’s and Mr. Hickson’s ceaseless complaints, backed up by a couple of brave M.P.s in the House of Commons, R. R. Stokes and Sir Irving Albery, various small improvements were made in our conditions.

  The best of these was a fortnightly visit from M. in the spring of 1941. Admiral Sir Barry Domvile came with him to visit his wife. He was a delightful and very clever man who had been Director of Naval Intelligence during the first war. In the 1930s he started an organization called The Link, with the object of encouraging friendship between Englishmen and Germans, and for this grave sin he was imprisoned. M. and Sir Barry were always in tearing spirits for the spree and from the police car which brought them across London from their prison to ours the Admiral used to shout to the astonished passers-by. One day they saw a red-headed girl. ‘Ginger for sport!’ cried the Admiral. M. and I talked without drawing breath; so much to hear, so much to tell. These visits gave my spirits a lift; I never felt cold on the day M. came, I was excited and happy. The visit over, one counted fourteen long and tedious days until the next.

  A Christian Scientist fellow-prisoner who told me when I was perishing with cold that it was ‘nur anscheinend—seemingly Lady Mosley’, was delighted when I was forced to admit that I never felt cold on visiting days. Although she believed that to feel cold was simply ‘error’, this German lady had a clever way of warming her cell. She collected waxed paper containers, tore them in strips and burned them in the enamel chamber pot. This made a delicious though transitory warmth, rather like when Hans Andersen’s little match girl burned all her matches. We then began to add eau de cologne to the flames. It burnt beautifully. We ordered large flagons of eau de cologne of the cheapest variety for our fire (paraffin was of course forbidden), and we read plays. Goethe, Schiller and Racine lasted us through the miserable winter, and like the gramophone concerts our play readings transported us far away from our sordid surroundings. My Christian Scientist friend broke all the prison rules and once she was carted off to the punishment cell. While she waited in this cheerless hole she wrote on the wall: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ In the end they did nothing, but it caused me intense amusement. I was very fond of her and she never minded being teased. Her favourite saying was culled from Mrs. Eddy: ‘In jedem Moment gibt Ihnen der liebe Gott alles was Sie brauchen.’23 Once for several wretched days no parcels came so that we ran out of everything, not a scrap of cheese nor a drop of eau de cologne was left and I was reduced to my bread and sugar diet. Suddenly the welcome cry of ‘Parcels!’ was heard. My Christian friend flew down and reappeared half an hour later with her arms full.

  ‘Lady Mosley! Ist es nicht rührend!’ she said, adding the inevitable ‘In jedem Moment’. When I pointed out that the benefactor was Harrods, where she had an account, she said I should never make a Scientist.

  Apart from physical discomfort everyone in the prison had dreadful anxieties and worries. When the docks burned in the air raids those whose homes were in the East End were frantic about their mothers and sisters and brothers; it was agony for them not being able to telephone and discover whether they were wounded, homeless, or even dead. One poor woman had a little boy aged eighteen months who was dragged away from her to a ‘home’ by the police when she and her husband were arrested. For many days nobody would tell her where he was. I was lucky, with Nanny and Muv and my sisters and the fact that my four children were out of London during the bombing. All the same a terrible worry half killed me. This was a message delivered by the Governor that Jonathan had had an emergency operation for acute appendicitis at school. I asked permission to go to him. It was refused by the Home Office. Day and night I could not rest, I walked to and fro in my cell and could not bear company. The girl in the cell under mine told me afterwards she heard me walking all night long. To think of my beloved boy lying between life and death and probably looking for me was almost unbearable. He was indeed very ill, but he recovered. The Governor sent for me and told me he had ‘turned the corner’. I said I supposed if he had died they would have allowed me to go, when it was too late. He did not answer; he knew very well that was exactly what would have happened. Many of the prisoners had sons or brothers in the forces; Lady Domvile’s elder son was killed in Crete that summer. Poor woman, she knew it even before she was told.

  I was not frightened of the air raids. This had nothing to do with courage; it was simply that I hardly cared whether I lived or died. The prison had the same effect that the hardships of war have upon soldiers: if you make people miserable enough they become very brave.

  The raids stopped during the spring of 1941 and at last I felt it was safe to have Max up for a visit. They allowed me an hour, and he was brought to a room in another part of the prison. He was completely
changed from the little baby I had left ten months before. He sat up and gazed about him with solemn expression. The wardresses thought him wonderful, but then they always took a great interest in my visitors, and the younger the better. Alexander was also surrounded by admirers when he was a prison visitor.

  So the months passed, and in June Germany attacked Russia. The war seemed as if it would never end. I no longer believed in release. Tom visited me whenever he had leave, and that autumn he had time one day to go to see M. at Brixton and then come on to me.

  ‘I am dining at Downing Street tonight,’ he told me. ‘Is there anything you want me to say?’

  ‘Only the same as always. That if we have to stay in prison couldn’t we at least be together?’ This was exactly what M. had said to him and he promised to do his best. I had no hope about it; the Governor and a Prison Commissioner I asked had both said that such a thing was out of the question. It was an administrative impossibility, according to them. However, Cousin Winston was a noted cutter of red tape and after his conversation with Tom during dinner he ordered the prison to find a way. So it was that our circumstances altered dramatically. After a separation of a year and a half we were re-united. Our joy was such that, unlikely as it might seem, one of the happiest days of my life was spent in Holloway prison.

  We were lodged in a house in the prison grounds called the Preventive Detention Block. It was hard by the mighty prison wall and set in a yard which had once had a lawn; this had been dug for victory and contained a few mouldering cabbages. Three other married couples were put there as our stable companions, but two of them were quickly released, and we settled down with Major and Mrs. de Laessoe. The men took it in turns to stoke the boiler; on M.’s day the water was stone cold and the kitchen ankle deep in coke. Major de Laessoe was a wonderful stoker and we gratefully allowed him to perform upon the boiler. He was altogether an admirable person who in the first war had won the M.C. and D.S.O. Brave, intelligent and very kind, he was the salt of the earth. They put him in prison because he was a prominent member of B.U. and, like us, was against going to war unless to defend Britain or the Empire.